Rmemlimit gem
The garbage collector in Ruby 1.x is blocking, and runs whenever there is a need to allocate more memory for new objects.
In a large application (eg. Rails) it runs many times per second, saving memory but hurting performance.
Run GC less often
To increase performance, you can use this gem to run the GC once per second instead, in a background thread.
gem 'rmemlimit' # in your Gemfile
Rmemlimit.setup # somewhere in app startup, or after forking
Set a memory limit for GC (requires linux /proc)
If you know roughly how much RAM you want your app to use, you can set that and GC will run whenever it is exceeded. Resident Set Size is checked once per second. Example to limit to 500MB:
Rmemlimit.gc_mb = 500
(Or you can use the RUBY_GC_MB environment variable).
Set a hard memory limit for Ruby
If your application sometimes eats too much memory and you'd rather have it kill itself when it passes a threshold, you can do limit to say 1000MB:
Rmemlimit.kill_mb = 1000
(Or you can use the RUBY_KILL_MB environment variable)
Forking
When fork()ing in ruby 1.9, only the thread doing the fork keeps running in the child. So you have to call Rmemlimit.setup in every child after forking, or GC won't be running at all.